Chapter 9: The Ghost Analyst

Valkyrie's POV

Present day: Four years later.

The four monitors emitted a glow that lit up the kitchen table and created a cold, blue mist over the small living room in the cabin. Outside, the Ocean kept on hitting the limestone cliffs with a steady rhythm, producing a continuous, steady hum that prevented the silence of the night from completely overwhelming me.

"Mommy? You're still awake?"

I didn't turn around right away; instead, I kept my eyes on the wall of scrolling financial data, but my hands quickly became softer as they pressed keys on the mechanical keyboard.

I used a single hotkey to minimise the primary terminal window and thus displayed a warm and harmless desktop screen.

I swung around in the chair to find Lachlan standing in the hallway opening, rubbing his eyes with small fists that had been balled up, wearing his preferred blue dinosaur pyjamas. His hair was messy because he had just woken up and was sticking up in all sorts of wild clumps. Yet when he lowered his hands and looked at me, my heart gave its usual, painful flutter.

Those eyes, clear, sharp, and silver.

Each morning and each night I used to look into the eyes of the man who had left us. But when I looked at Lachlan’s, it showed no coldness or arrogance, only pure and innocent warmth.

"Nightmare, sweet pea?" I asked gently and opened my arms to him.

Lachlan moved silently across the cold floorboards on his bare feet and got into my lap without saying anything. He put his head under my chin and, with his small hand, curled into the fabric of my sweater. "I thought I had heard the storm again," he whispered into my neck, "the big one."

"THE STORM'S OVER, sweetheart," I whispered, softly kissing the warm top of his head and taking in the smell of the baby shampoo and the freshly washed clothes.

"It's only the tide. Mommy's right here with you and you're completely safe."

Gently, I rocked him in the quiet room until his breathing became slower and his body grew heavy and relaxed against my chest.

After a few minutes, I picked him up, carried him back down the hallway to his bedroom, and got him under his thick wool blanket. I kissed his forehead one final time before pulling the door shut so that it was only just an inch open, allowing the warm light from the hallway to pass through.

The warmth that was in my chest changed once again into a cold, sharp focus as I went back to the kitchen.

I sat in front of the monitors, pressing the spacebar; the blue terminal window came back to life.

The world thought Valkyrie Callender had disappeared completely four years ago.

Melbourne's high society had forgotten my name.

Victoria Vance must have regarded me as a defeated parasite that she had successfully managed to get off her family's shoe.

As for Kaelen... he had probably buried my memory beneath his billions and had thus been able to continue his rule as Australia's most ruthless financial magnate.

They believed that I was dead, broke, or hiding because of shame.

They were unaware of Aegis.

Under the calm exterior of my ghost existence in Port Campbell, I had constructed a shadow empire. Running under the entity code "Aegis", I controlled a stealthy, off-grid overseas hedge fund that passed through private servers that I had built personally in my attic.

I wasn't interested in luxury, nor did I care about diamonds or penthouses. All the money I made through market arbitrage was directed towards two things: Chloe's specialized medical trust and a slow and methodical buildup of Vance Global securities.

I typed rapidly on the keys to bring up the master ledger.

ENTITY: AEGIS CAPITAL.

TARGET: VANCE GLOBAL ENTERPRISES (ASX: VGE).

CURRENT ACCUMULATED EQUITY: 11.8%

A very weak and cold smile appeared on my lips.

For over forty-eight months, I pursued Vance Global in secrecy; each time its shares fell in value and short-sellers attempted to pressure its subsidiary businesses, Aegis was present in the dark and was quietly absorbing the floating shares through twenty-four different shell accounts.

I wasn't trying to harm him but rather to get some leverage. As soon as Aegis reached the 15% threshold, corporate law required an automatic disclosure, and I would be given a mandatory seat on the executive board.

I intended to walk back into Vance Global not as a disgraced and discarded contract wife but as the company's largest institutional shareholder that Kaelen Vance had ever known.

I was going to take away Victoria's executive powers, place Chloe's medical care in a permanent and unbreakable trust, and make Kaelen face the truth.

My terminal emitted a soft, melodic sound, and at the same time a message automatically informing me that an order had been executed appeared on the central monitor.

BLOCK TRADE COMPLETED: 250,000 SHARES BOUGHT

AEGIS EQUITY NOW AT 12.1%

I whispered to the empty room, "Getting closer," and my blood was humming with a quiet, dangerous satisfaction. "Just three percent more, Kaelen."

Suddenly, the screen glitched.

The lines on the scrolling ticker stopped in the middle of the frame. A sharp red border appeared around the main terminal window and flashed a faint light in the kitchen.

I stopped breathing for a moment and leaned forward, my fingers hovering above the keyboard.

"What is this?"

A firewall alert specific to that area was triggered on my private server relay. It wasn't just the case that someone was monitoring the stock trades; someone had, in fact, launched a high-level counter-ping directly at my offshore proxy.

I put my hands down on the keys and carried out a manual IP disconnect in order to clear the routing tables.

SYSTEM ERROR: PORT OVERRIDE DETECTED

PROXY SHIELD HAS BEEN BREACHED

A panic, cold and sharp, shot through my veins.

This wasn't an automated check for market security; it was a targeted cyberattack of military standard.

A person on the other end was actually searching for the physical terminal carrying out the Aegis purchases.

I moved my hand to the main power switch underneath the desk in order to cut the connection myself, but before my fingers could reach the switch, my central monitor became completely blank.

The numbers stopped scrolling, and the screen turned black.

Then, a single line of text typed itself across the center of the black screen, character by character, in bright, glaring silver font:

“I see you, Aegis; I know your location.”

My phone on the desk next to the keyboard gave a vibration.

Slowly, I turned my head, my heart pounding inside my ribs like that of a bird that was trapped. I picked up the phone with a trembling hand and lit up the screen.

An incoming email notification sat at the top of the screen from an internal Vance Global domain address:

‘ATTACHMENT: LIVE GPS RADAR VEHICLE EN ROUTE TO PORT CAMPBELL (ESTIMATED ARRIVAL: 8 MINUTES).’